would you love me tomorrow (like you say you love me now)
by ghost-of-high-heart
Summary: With or without the jacket, the memory knelled over and over, an echoing reverberation permanently affixed in the passageways between the archives of his mind, gnawing at him like a church bell's toll, you're a Serpent. Or, Jughead brings Betty up to speed.


" _All I know is the way I feel_

 _Whenever you're around_.

 _You're got a way of lifting me up_ ,

 _Instead of bringing me down_."

— _Fleetwood Mac_ , _Love In Stone_.

There was a sound of a rhythmic rapt of knuckles against the window-pane, and even before she threw open the curtains and pulled up the bottom sash/panel, Betty already knew whose face she'd see.

"Jug," she breathed out in greeting, equal parts pleased and surprised by his unexpected appearance; a shy smile already creeping onto her face. "What are you doing here?"

Her boyfriend gave jouncy shrug in lieu of an actual answer and then tilted his head, catching her questioning gaze with a darkly glinting eye. The strange expression he bore but moments prior melted into a smirk.

"Arise, fair sun," he recited, swinging one long leg over the windowsill and slipping into her room with noiseless familiarity, "and kill the envious moon, who is already sick and pale with grief that thou her maid art far more fair than she."

"Oh, hush, Romeo," Betty whispered, grinning, and, walking backwards, pulled Jughead further into the room by the wrist. "You don't want to wake my mom up, do you?"

Truthfully, both of her parents had already doused their habitual dose of Valium and settled down for the night near an hour ago, but Polly was downstairs and half-binging half-napping through a comedy show on Netflix; and it would not be the first time since she returned from Thornhill when, startled by a weird noise, she would panic and rouse the entire Cooper household in her wake. Jughead Jones sneaking about in Betty's bedroom could definitely constitute as a source of a 'weird noise'. Thus, Betty, preferring to err on the side of caution, quickly made her way towards her door and locked it.

She turned, half-expecting his mouth to be either twisted into a wry, knowing grin, tongue ready with a tart quip, or for it to slide against her own in a seamless kiss, locking them together for a good half-an-hour in a haze of ardour and romance. Instead, Betty found Jughead directing a thousand-yard stare at her floral wallpaper and absently fingering a thick, gold ribbon she'd wrapped in a bow around a parchment lampshade of her bedside light.

The soft, blue-tinged glow cast ghoulish shadows on his features, highlighting the hollows of his cheeks, the sharp cut of his jaw, and the dark, sooty bruises lining his pale eyes.

Jughead Jones, her boyfriend and possibly-maybe-definitely her soulmate, was darksome and handsome, even at his broodiest. Jughead Jones, the distrait boy in front of her, was sunken-eyed and weary, and twice as pondersome than usual. A troubling picture, indeed.

* * *

When she called his name, he did not stir.

What had he been thinking, coming here?

"Jughead?"

Was he thinking at all? Highly unlikely, as he was at an unexpected point of his life when seeking out Betty had become instinctual.

"Jug, you're scaring me."

He should not have come here.

But as it often was with all things pertaining to one Betty Cooper, the _should_ of Jughead's life — that meta-thinking part of him which dissected and compartmentalised his life into digestible segments as if it was a constructible narrative; the part that disassociated Jughead from his own problems as a way to make them bearable and replaced the _friendless outsider_ descriptor with the _objective observer_ in his own book; yes, _that_ integral part of Jughead Jones that kept him sane and resentment-free all those years by turning his feelings of alienation into something productive, something he could work with, by ceaselessly insisting that he did not want other people to understand him and he only ever needed himself — went out the window with a sharp whistle and a parting _buddy_ , _you're in too deep_.

"Jug," Betty's voice finally pierced the fog of his thoughts as she laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. "Jug, you all right?"

Jughead's head snapped up sharply, startled. His eyes locked with Betty's, and he could see the frantic look he bore mirror itself on her face, bleached bone-pale by the streaming moonlight and hauntingly lovely.

 _With or without the jacket_ , the memory knelled over and over, an echoing reverberation permanently affixed in the passageways between the archives of his mind, gnawing at him like a church bell's toll, _you're a Serpent_.

"Just peachy," he quipped, reflexively.

" _Jug_ ," Betty pressed, stepping into his personal space, her fingers burning a path from his shoulder to his sternum. "Talk to me. _Please_."

A pause hung between them like the waxing crescent outside. Then:

"There's a distinct possibility," Jughead began, slowly and with a resigned sigh; deliberately choosing his words for minimal emotional damage, "that you may…have been…onto something. About the Serpents. About what they…and the jacket…may mean…for me."

"Jug?"

He hated himself for putting a furrow in her brow and the wavering edge to her tone, but this needed to be addressed. _I want to know all of you_ , she'd insisted and Jughead had never had the willpower to deny Betty anything.

 _This is me_ , he thought, _this is who I am_. Living on the wrong side of luck, the left edge of danger; tethering on the fringes of an abyssal, depthless cliff.

With a soft sigh, he pulled off his beanie, tucking it into a pocket of his denim-jacket, and ran a shaky hand through his damp hair. "Babe, I gotta initiate the Full Disclosure Protocol."

Betty's eyes widened; in the moonlighted, twilit bedroom, the vivid brightness of them glowed — they tethered him.

The Full Disclosure Protocol was exactly what it said on the tin — full disclosure, no judgement and no interruptions. They had drafted it in the wake of Jughead's disastrous birthday celebrations — complete, thorough, and unsurprisingly legally sound, because _of course_ the two of them would utilise legislative language in a pact to facilitate their relationship.

Betty had employed it several times — for the most part to discuss her anxiety issues, the incident with Chuck Clayton, threatening to boil him alive in a hot-tub and promptly forgetting all about that, and, as always, Being a Cracked Cooper™. Jughead, only once — in the wake of his father's arrest, divulging everything about Toledo, his mother, and the life he would never have.

So Betty nodded, biting her lip anxiously, her heart atwitter, and led her boyfriend towards her bed, pushing him to sit on it with a gentle palm against a bared clavicle. She focused her eyes on that pale strip of skin as she perched next to him, knocking their knees together when he shifted to face her. She watched, transfixed, as Jughead's adam's apple bobbed once, then twice, and her eyes lingered on the side of his neck, where a triangle of moles rested, and on the stray, inky curls twisting around his nape.

Reluctantly pulling her eyes away, she focused them on the angled planes of his face instead, and self-consciously tugged on the hem of her skirt and smoothed out the imagined wrinkles of her cardigan. Then:

"All right," she said after taking a deep breath. "Proceed."

As he always became when it came to emotional vulnerability, Jughead's explanation was succinct and matter-of-fact, grimly veracious if a little dry.

He began like this, tone as cool and detached as his expression: "I postulated the attack at Fred Andrews could have been personal. Upon sharing this hypothesis with Archie, he theorised it might have a rogue Serpent with a drudge. So I called Viper and asked him to look into it.

" _He did._ "

As he explained whom and what he'd found waiting for him in the trailer earlier that evening, Jughead involuntarily reflected on his father and the entailment of his legacy. _Serpents take care of their own_ , F.P. had avowed. Jughead had been cognisant of the moral implications of that statement in the abstract way one was intellectually aware of quantum physics — better not to think on it too much lest you get a skull-splitting headache.

Now, though, his mind was caught in a double think: the ethical line was as stark as a high-contrast shot in a film noir, as homogeneously grey as a winter skyline.

"Hence, I spent the last three hours scrubbing out another man's blood out of the carpeting because I hadn't been careful enough with my words," Jughead concluded the account.

Betty let out a shaky breath he hadn't realised she'd been holding. "They roughed-up a man because—"

"Because _I_ asked them to," Jughead cut in, the sight of bloodied brass-knuckles and the stead dripdrip _drip_ of viscous gore seared into his eyelids. Persistently taunting him each time he blinked.

Immediately, Betty grasped his hands with her own, squeezing them tightly. Jughead could feel the fine bones of her fingers pressing alongside his own. "No. _No_ , don't be like that. It's not your fault."

Jughead tilted his head, still not looking at her directly. "Perhaps," he acquiesced, half-heartedly, "but it is my responsibility."

Some part of him must have suspected — _had to have suspected_ — it could end in blood; otherwise the events of this night had completely blindsided him, and that was beyond exceptionable and more than utterly intolerable. Such lack of anticipation would mean he had not thought everything through, had not deliberated his actions three steps ahead like he always did, and such blind, over-trusting gullibility was inexcusable.

 _Serpents take care of their own_.

 _Well_ , Jughead thought, darkly, _talk about a double entendre_.

Betty gave his fingers a brief squeeze and Jughead realised with a start that she had neither let go of his hand nor averted her gaze from his face. An overwhelming wave of tender fondness for her surged through him. "Jesus, Jug, they basically made you into their crime boss, haven't they?"

"Well, technically," corrected Jughead, because of course he had to, "I'm more of a Michael to my Dad's Vito — and, yeah, judging from your horrified expression that was a bad analogy. Trust me, Betts, I won't go the route of good-man-turned-bad. And if by misfortune of fate, I do — you should dump me faster than a used Kleenex."

" _Shut_. _Up_ ," Betty exclaimed, a tad more vehemently than he'd expected, and, grabbing a throw pillow from behind him, hit Jughead twice over the head with it, punctuating her words. "Nobody is breaking up with anybody any time soon, and if you know what's good for you, Jughead Jones, you better not entertain that train of thought again."

"I yield, I yield," Jughead gasped and fell backwards onto Betty's bed, laughing inexplicably. "Corporal Cooper, you have purged me of treasonous thoughts."

"I had better," Betty huffed and gave an affected sniff. She looked at him then, laying on his back on top of her mountain of throw-pillows, hands resting across his abdomen, and gaze searching for answers her ceiling did not have.

Her gaze softened. Jughead wasn't his father or the Serpents or like anyone else she knew. Jughead was Jughead, and…

And she loved him and she was in love with him; these were the irrefutable facts. That alone was enough.

With that in mind, Betty crawled up the bed and slid up next to her boyfriend, inserting herself into his space, and, wrapping an arm around his waist, tucked her head in the crook of his neck.

"This doesn't change anything," she whispered, hotly and full of surety, "I love you and I meant what I said earlier — I'm not going anywhere, not even if you ask."

 _That's what I'm afraid of_ , he wanted to say, but did not. Instead, Jughead angled down his head and slid his mouth against her own in a lingering kiss. It was deep and slow and very sweet, much like the one they shared earlier that afternoon. It melted his fears away. It made her never want to stop.

Except they had and when she sighed, Jughead pressed a his lips against the crown of her golden head, whispering _I love you_ , _too_ ; and Betty felt the shimmering ardour inside of her upsurge into a searing blaze, like it had two days ago, fervid and flaming and unstoppable.

She smiled up at him, bright and sweet, and laced her fingers through his, tight and true.

"I love you," she repeated, and kissed him again.

* * *

note: Title comes from Fleetwood Mac's Love That Burns.  
I tried to write this as an exercise to get over my huge writer's block, but I'm not sure I succeeded. Part two will come as soon as I actually write it. Now, excuse me, I have episode two to watch.


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